Squatter by Kevin Frazier
At night he smoked in bed, tapped ash and cinders onto the tattered sheet and the beer-stained mattress.
He was still a squatter. They’d been kicked out, all the squatters, seven years ago. Now he lived in a trailer along one of the Berlin canals, but in his mind he had never left the squat.
With his free hand he touched his face. He fingered the long wood spike in his earlobe and the small gold hoop in his nostril. His black hair looked like ruffled crow-feathers. His skin was mottled and pocked, and the seam of a scar curved along his nose.
He kept smoking, lit a new cigarette as he felt himself falling asleep. He was a squatter, now and always. He was over there, squatting on the other side of the city. He wasn’t here, watching the cinders and ash drift to the sheet. He was on the squat, getting ready for the march, preparing to protest the German involvement in Afghanistan, testing out his insults for the hypocrite Greens.
A cinder, gold and faint, pulsed against the sheet, and he could smell some of the old cotton blend starting to burn. It didn’t matter. He was about to leave for the march.
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About the Author
Kevin Frazier
Born: United States
Now Resides: Helsinki, Finland
Bio: I’ve published a novel and a nonfiction book about Central Asia, and my short stories have appeared in Fiction, The South Carolina Review, and many other places. I’m also a frequent book reviewer and essayist, with recent pieces in The Common Review and Open Letters Monthly.
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image by loveiisparanoid.
